California Is Finally Getting Serious About Pesticides Near Schools

Research by the Center for Regional Change is cited in the Nation.

More than a year ago, public health officials warned that Latino children in California were nearly twice as likely as white kids to attend schools close to heavy pesticide applications. As I reported in April, in a FERN-produced story that ran online in The Nation, Latino parents in some communities knew all too well that their children were exposed to pesticides. Regulators knew it, too, yet in a complaint that dragged on for a dozen years, they did little to remedy the situation.

With the generous help of experts at Jonathan London’s UC Davis Center for Regional Change, who mapped the pesticide data to ZIP codes, I found a disturbing trend: use of many of the chemicals had fallen statewide since 2007, but had risen dramatically in a handful of communities already coping with high pesticide use.